The BCMA frenzy: Tracking the 37 drugs around the world racing to overtake bluebird bio and Celgene

Bluebird bio’s bb2121 is sitting on top of a volcano of clinical rivalry aimed at BCMA.

Currently in an advanced clinical trial, Nick Leschly’s biotech is in a vulnerable lead position as they hunt first mover advantage. In cancer R&D, developers can move fast. And coming in a close second can still position you for success, as Merck found out with PD-1 and Kite/Gilead proved with CAR-T.

But there’s no end of appetite among developers willing to come in much, much later. A whole new group is coming out of China that could end up commoditizing each of these fields.

To get a better lay of the global landscape here, I asked Jun Tang at the Cancer Research Institute — who’s been running a fascinating effort to stay on top of the full explosion of I/O activity — to scrape the database to see what’s actually in the clinic. He discovered that there are 38 clinical-stage BCMA-targeted agents in development — 27 CAR-Ts, 6 CD-3 targeted bispecifics, 3 antibody-drug conjugates and a single novel cell therapy and monoclonal antibody.

You can see the full chart below.

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And then there is one unlisted CD16a (the 'a' is the important part) innate immune cells engagers targeting BCMA from Affimed, previously labeled AFM26, and now partnered to an undisclosed entity just at the same time Genentech announced a partnership with Affimed spending its than current market capitalization ($96 million) as upfront payment and up to $5 billion in milestones and up-to double digit royalties for each marketed product out of that collaboration.As AFM26 was supposed to be IND-ready by now my speculation would be, that it should see light for Roche anytime soon also with MM as a first indication.

Reply

Dieter Hovekamp ago↷Dieter Hovekamp

Correction and links regarding my speculation about the Genentech / Affimed deal:My comment incorrectly specified 'up-to double digit royalties for each marketed product out of that collaboration' as a note from my memory but that was not disclosed and should read 'In addition, Affimed is eligible to receive tiered royalties from Genentech on net sales of licensed product candidates on a product-by-product and country-by-country basis' as disclosed in the SEC-filing from August 2018 (see https://affimed.gcs-web.com/node/6796/html ).

More on the Genentech / Affimed deal that may speculatively see an BCMA-CD16a as a first target on Endpts see https://endpts.com/cancer-powerhouse-genentech-lines-up-an-nk-and-t-cell-alliance-with-affimed-thats-loaded-with-billions-in-biobucks/

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Anonymous ago↷

While not BCMA-specific, there are other therapies targeting MM such as GSK's NY-ESO-1/LAGE-1a-specific TCR-T, and numerous studies using NK cells from various sources. In addition, Fate Therapeutics plans to advance an iPSC-derived CD38 negative, CD16 engineered (ADCC enhanced) NK cell therapy for use in conjunction with anti-CD38 mAbs. The MM field could become very crowded, and if any of the candidate medicines shows differential efficacy, the treatment landscape might evolve quite dramatically.